Weaver gets two life sentences for killing daughter’s friends

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OREGON CITY, Ore. — A man accused of killing two of his daughter’s friends and hiding their bodies in his back yard pleaded guilty Wednesday to murder charges and received two life sentences.

Ward Weaver, 41, avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty in the 2002 deaths of the girls, classmates and friends who disappeared within two months of each other.

Speaking in a hoarse whisper, hunched over and looking mainly down, Weaver told the judge he had come to court on “medications” but agreed that the plea agreement was a product of his “own free will.” It was not clear what the medications were for.

Weaver, whose rental home was just steps from the school bus stop where Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis were last seen, quickly became a focus of the investigation. He responded by inviting television crews into his home to film him proclaiming his innocence, giving interviews on top of the concrete slab in his back yard under which investigators later found the body of 12-year-old Ashley.

During the sentencing, Judge Robert Herndon told Weaver, “I hope there is a special place in hell for people like you.”

Weaver was arrested in August 2002 after his son’s girlfriend ran from his home, naked except for a tarp, screaming that he had tried to rape her.

After that arrest, FBI investigators cordoned off his back yard and searched for the girls’ bodies. They found Ashley’s in a barrel under the concrete slab. The body of 13-year-old Miranda was in a box in Weaver’s tool shed.